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First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

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Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#651

Post by harry8 »

richbell wrote: post #512
harry8 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> How many former spooks signed a letter claiming it had all the hallmarks of a russian information operation to influence an election? 50? This was then promoted to "russian disinformation" and treated as fact far and wide across the media. The Hunter Biden laptop did reek of a Russian operation. It was clearly an attempt to hurt Biden in the 11th hour. Even if the content is genuine, which everything I've seen appe…

sibling comment is flagged and really should not be.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#652

Post by phpisthebest »

acdha wrote: post #646
phpisthebest wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020 That is not accurate at all...

Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibili…

It was facebook[1] stated policy to prevent all discussion, so even if there was not a user level bann they were removing all posts and discussions about it

Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned

[1] https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#653

Post by lenkite »

ethbr0 wrote: post #261
geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

People need to start thinking of politically-impactful truths in terms of probability distributions and outcome possibility spaces, rather than absolutely. If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses. Any information (not leak; was leak) would have serious ramifications to the political systems of the two largest economies in the world (the US and China). What are the chances that we'll ever h…

> Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible?

Well. Dr Fauci was the guy who gave the money to this institute for gain-of-function experiments which would not be tolerated in the US. (Get the dirty, dangerous work done somewhere else where people can ideally die without causing a fuss).

"Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci. The award to EcoHealth Alliance, a research organization which studies the spread of viruses from animals to humans, included subawards to Wuhan Institute of Virology and East China Normal University."

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#654

Post by jsnell »

jleyank wrote: post #648
jsnell wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month. If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would…

There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics. Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele... https://journals.…

I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't.

Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The

Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy.

It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#655

Post by Reason077 »

jlmorton wrote: post #592
Reason077 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.

Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific. So the idea that all of these researchers would have contracted Covid and present with symptoms specific/indicative of Covid is absurd. The chances of that must be infinitesimally small. If they had the typical, flu- and cold-like symptoms that most people experience…

> "Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific."

I've had Covid three times (March '20, December '20, August '22) and as a healthy middle-aged adult, I'm not sure I'd agree.

The first two times were pretty wretched: I was sick enough that I could barely eat or get out of bed for a week or so, and it was many weeks before I felt completely recovered. The third time (after getting vaccinated) was definitely milder and I recovered much more quickly, but was still pretty ill for a couple of days.

But notably, the symptoms for me were quite different from a typical 'flu. One thing that was very distinctive/specific for me was the wild changes in taste perception: I couldn't even eat some foods that I normally like due to them tasting so bad. I struggled to brush my teeth because I couldn't taste the mint flavour in toothpaste, only bitter chemicals!

Of course, it's fair to say that it doesn't affect everyone equally: some of my friends and family had similar experiences to me while others only had fairly mild symptoms.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#656

Post by Reason077 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #640
logifail wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this: "After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an e…

It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.

> "At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior."

Not entirely true. The UK definition was death _within 28 days_ of the first lab confirmed, positive Covid test. Not "any time prior".

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#657

Post by Reason077 »

Pyramus wrote: post #620
jlmorton wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific. So the idea that all of these researchers would have contracted Covid and present with symptoms specific/indicative of Covid is absurd. The chances of that must be infinitesimally small. If they had the typical, flu- and cold-like symptoms that most people experience…

Not sure why you are being downvoted, that is something that struck me as well. In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta. Don't get me wrong, Covid is a deadly disease with a lethality of 1-2 %, but the typical symptoms for a 30 year old are mild.

> "In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta."

Not my experience! OG Covid (March 2020) was just as severe as alpha/beta (December 2020). My most recent infection (August 2022) was much milder, but that could also be explained by being vaccinated.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#658

Post by SomeRndName11 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #640
logifail wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this: "After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an e…

It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.

[flagged]

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#659

Post by SomeRndName11 »

Pyramus wrote: post #628
scrollaway wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital. The severity also depends a lot on viral load.

> The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital. No, the only SARS-Cov-2 strain with (likely) decreased mortality is Omicron, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 The fact that Covid (as an illness) has become milder is due to the hosts adapting, not the virus b…

[flagged]

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#660

Post by SomeRndName11 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #261
geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

People need to start thinking of politically-impactful truths in terms of probability distributions and outcome possibility spaces, rather than absolutely. If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses. Any information (not leak; was leak) would have serious ramifications to the political systems of the two largest economies in the world (the US and China). What are the chances that we'll ever h…

[flagged]
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